They are easy to overlook, but they are likely the last visible trace of an earlier church on the same ground, a building that has otherwise entirely disappeared. The graveyard at Kilnanare carries that particular quality common to sites where the ecclesiastical structure has vanished but the burial ground has continued in use, leaving the dead to outlast the building that once gave the place its religious purpose.

The enclosure is trapezoidal in shape, roughly forty metres east to west and slightly narrower at the eastern end than the west, bounded by a stone wall with vertical coping stones along its top. A pair of wrought iron gates marks the entrance on the south side. Most of the headstones date to the twentieth century, though a number of nineteenth-century examples survive as well, suggesting continuity of use across at least two hundred years. The yew tree, long associated with Irish and British churchyards and sometimes believed to predate the Christian use of a site, was once represented here by several specimens. According to the site's caretaker, only one now remains.